Keeping a worm farm is not only a fun experience for kids it is also a great way to teach children about life cycles and food scrap recycling. On hot days though our poor little wiggly friends can really suffer from the heat and sadly they often perish. Here are some tips contributed by our fabulous facebook followers to help prevent this from happening:

• Do not water your worms on a hot day. Whilst it may seem a nice thing to do to help cool them down, it can actually boil them! Wetting some hessian and draping it over the top of the outside of the  farm though acts as evaporative cooling.
• Placing a piece of hessian or carpet on top of the food scraps helps to keep your farm cool in summer (and warm in winter).
• Keep your farm on the south side of the house and in the shade if possible. Under eaves in the shade is another alternative.
• Add straw mulch to your worm farm.
• Finally, if your worm do become extremely stressed from the heat they will go into survival mode and lay lots of eggs in the farm. If the worms then die, keep the farm going with only a small amount of food and in approximately two weeks you should have lots of baby worms.

If you follow these tips I’m sure your worms will be much happier.
Do you have any tips you can add about keeping worms happy and cool?